It ain't over yet!

Well, first I must congratulate my ghost-writing friend Mr Ansell for his enormously creative and entertaining account of each days events, generally based on our five-minute phone call at the end of each day. All you have read is true - only the facts have been altered to make it more interesting.

The Beast is still in the desert, somewhere out near White Sands Grocery. (I won't give the exact location in case someone gets there before us and nicks it, although they'll have a tough job moving it!) So what needs doing? The tie-bar is so completely bent that moving the steering wheel only bends it more, without moving the wheels, so we need a big lump hammer to break the taper joints before we can replace it. The front LH wheel is off the rim, not a major problem. One of the main engine oil pipes is crushed against the clutch master cylinder, but not leaking - so we need to fix that before we run the engine, to avoid oil starvation. The engine runs but the throttle is sticking. The whole of the front LH area is stoved in, bonnet/wing/lights etc well knackered. Whether there is anough clearance for the front LH wheel to turn, we will only find out once the field repairs are accomplished. Oh, and we're down to three out of six bolts holding the RH hub in place - if they go, we're down the 2WD. The rest have sheared off one by one over the last 2 days.

The good news (yes, there is some!) is that despite all the penalties we got for yesterday's misadventure - about 18 hours by my reckoning - we managed a 10th place finish and have the trophies to prove it! Fadi Melky and Mario Mitri got the 6th place we were hoping for, along with the 3rd-in-Gulf prize, which would have been ours as well if the dice had rolled the other way. I'd set a top-ten finish as my aim, so I should be happy with that - but it's hard when it could have been so much better.

I now realise that we have the speed and the suspension to take on the best in the world - works teams excepted! We pulled 170kph (GPS reading) on the gatch track at the start of Day 5, and climbing through the dunes no-one could catch us. When we crashed out, we had only Novitsky (top seed and eventual winner in the BMW X3) ahead of us, having passed everyone else. With a bit more work on the cooling, we'll be set for next season.

Major thanks are due to Rick Carless and Cesar Marquez, our untiring service crew who battled (and bodged!) for 5 days to keep us running - without their hard work and late nights we'd never have made it. Words cannot express our gratitude, they are the real stars of the team.

Anyway, I have to go - there's a Beast in the desert that needs my help.